Various networked gaming systems have been developed over the years beginning at least in the 1980's. With acceptance and utilization, users such as casino operators have found it desirable to increase the computer management of their facilities and expand features available on networked gaming systems. For instance, there are various areas in the management of casinos that is very labor intensive, such as reconfiguring gaming machines, changing games on the gaming machines, and performing cash transactions for customers.
Until recently, the gaming industry has been a collection of proprietary systems and communication protocols. In many cases, a casino had to buy the entire system (games, controllers, backend systems, and the like) from one company. Most casinos would prefer to use a mix of different manufacturer's games on the gaming floor, and then pick the best backend system that suits their needs. Until recently, this was not a realistic expectation.
A few years ago, several gaming entities formed the Gaming Standards Association (GSA) to define standardized protocols by which games, gaming controllers, and backend systems could communicate. This allows interoperability of different manufacturer's equipment, as well as giving the casinos the freedom to choose whatever manufacturers they want for the various components of a gaming system. One of the GSA protocols is the Game-to-System (G2S) protocol, which is designed to define the messages between a gaming machine and a backend system. This protocol does include messages for handling software download and configuration of the gaming machines.
The introduction of download and configuration capabilities in the gaming environment creates considerable operational challenges. Downloading typically requires a considerable volume of gaming content to be transferred over the network. Many casinos are open twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, which requires downloading to take place without disrupting normal gaming activities. Accordingly, in some circumstances it may be necessary to limit download bandwidth, at the expense of download time, in order to not overly tax the network resources. Thus, a way of easily monitoring download progress would be invaluable to casino operators.
In one configuration, a download system may be centralized and “push” the data down to the games. In this case, the content server knows how much has been downloaded at any time. However, in a “pull” system, where the gaming devices are told where to go for the data and the games are taking (“pulling”) the data from the content server, the server generally does not know how much data a given game has downloaded. Thus, a way is needed for the games to keep the download management system appraised of how far along they are in the download process.